The most dangerous games

Michael Haneke doesn't judge his audience.

In his shocking—some would say reprehensible—Funny Games (1997), Austrian director Michael Haneke gives the audience a taste of its own medicine. Working from a simple premise—a bourgeois family is held captive by two men claiming to be servants from next door—he sets in motion a series of increasingly violent reprisals, none of which turn out quite the way the viewer is led to expect. Chekhov notwithstanding, that big kitchen knife shown early on won’t be used as a weapon. The villains periodically turn to the camera and claim they’re torturing the victims for our enjoyment.

Haneke has told journalists that viewers who could learn from Funny Games will stay until the end, and that those who don’t need the lesson will simply walk out. The problem is that Haneke, apart from being an uncommonly talented filmmaker (his Code Unknown and Caché are almost good enough to make you forget Funny Games), is also a viewer. Surely he acknowledges that curiosity is part of the reason audiences stay. Surely if he hadn’t made Funny Games—if he were simply confronted with it as a moviegoer—he’d be as riveted and appalled as everyone else.

“It’s difficult to say,” he muses in a phone interview. “I mean, probably at first I would be upset and mad, and then maybe after a while I would say, well, you know, maybe there’s some truth in it.…You come to realize that the attempt to show you how well you can be manipulated is not so stupid at all.”

But would he stay until the end?

“I’m not sure. I don’t think so. Besides,” he deadpans, to the extent that one can deadpan via translator, “I know how it ends.”

By now, a lot of people do—and did, even before Haneke’s shot-for-shot, English-language remake of Funny Games (starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth) opened last week. When he was approached about the remake rights, he saw an opportunity for Funny Games to reach the American audience for whom it was always designed. No, it’s not anti-American; it’s simply a critique of mainstream cinema, which is, Haneke notes, dominated by Hollywood.

By re-creating the first film so precisely, the remake seems to presume that moviegoers would pay for the same insult twice (which is, in a sense, what happens whenever they see a remake or a sequel). Haneke acknowledges that the duplication gives the movie an interesting subtext but says that idea wasn’t part of his design. The new movie is simply a vehicle for Funny Games to reach a broader audience.

“The viewer who sees it for the second time who saw the first version—I would assume he is mostly interested in comparing his impressions with the memories he has from the first film, and he might be impressed or not impressed in seeing it again and comparing it,” Haneke says. “Obviously he was intrigued by the first film. He was interested by the first film enough to want to see it again.”

He adds with a laugh, “It’s more a matter for the production company—whether maybe they want to issue a double DVD or something.”

Doing the remake shot-for-shot, he suggests, was more of a personal experiment than an ideological one. “If you have nothing to add, then why add something just for the sake of adding it?” he asks. “There’s no better way than to do it shot-for-shot, and also, of course, from a filmmaker’s point of view, it was a challenge to see whether I could really remake a film exactly alike under different circumstances.”

Viewers’ intuitive responses, however, are likely to remain the same. In the most notorious scene, the Watts character (played by Susanne Lothar in the original) reaches for a gun. Haneke then memorably chides viewers for wanting payback, even in the character’s self-defense. It’s a hypocritical stance; would Haneke himself not reach for the gun?

“The irony of it after all is that in reality in such a situation, the likelihood that the victim comes out ahead is very slim, if not impossible,” he says. “In reality, usually the victim does not come out ahead. It’s only in film that there’s always this lucky coincidence that leads the victim out of [his or her] problems.”

Amazingly, Haneke hasn’t seen Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), loosely based on the Leopold and Loeb murders, which likewise implicates viewers in its central crime, carefully aligning our point of view with that of the two murderer-protagonists. Unlike Haneke’s film, Rope critiques voyeurism even as it concedes its appeal. But Haneke doesn’t see Funny Games as a slap on the wrist. “I don’t say anything to the viewer,” he says. “I neither blame him nor condemn him. The film is a construct. What the viewer does with it, I don’t have any judgment there.”

Giving the game away, he adds, “It’s only the critics who have to watch the second version again who are the poor devils.”

Funny Games is in theaters now.

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